Hacker News Reader

Comment by pezgordo | Hacker News Reader

What would be a better language? Most of the harness apps will be spending most of their time waiting for the models response and tool calling rather than running their code.

Languages with less opensource footprint or too verbose are at the losing side in a llm-driven world.

View on HN

Go, rust, zig would be my choices in that order.

> most of their time waiting for the models response and tool calling rather than running their code.

You’d think that! Yet claude-code spends a very surprising amount of CPU just doing text layout work and other mysterious things, likely due to their decision to use React to build a TUI for some reason.

Those three languages would be very difficult for creating a system with the level of extensibility that Pi has.

Why? Lots of systems written in those languages are extremely extensible.

You either need to rebuild the harness every time you want to make a change, or a lot of deliberate effort is required to maintain an API surface for extensions, distinct from internal implementations, or you can embed an interpreter like Lua, Python, or... JavaScript. Or you could instead go the Pi route and use an interpreted language, and just load extensions into the interpreter, alongside the program itself. When one of the main goals is extensibility, the latter seems like the obvious choice.

I feel like people have forgot how extensions used to work long time ago with compiled languages. Extensions can be just dynamically loaded, (e.g. DLL from Windows world, .so from Linux). There is no need to compile the whole harness. This is also possible when using Rust, but people are just lazy.

And yes, API must be maintained for compatibility, but that is needed anyway.

All of which would require shipping a compiler along with the app.

I feel like TypeScript is very verbose language to be honest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com